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Flickr project to host Library of Congress photos

Here’s a really interesting opportunity for some visual literacy and historical analysis work with your history students!

Hot update:PhotosNormandi thanks to a quick comment to this post from Patrick Peccatte. This is another stunning collection for history students.

The Library of Congress and photosharing site Flickr today announced a partnership that will put photos from the LoC’s collection online. These are public-domain, copyright-free photos from the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information and The George Grantham Bain Collection, for which no known copyright exists. The collections will be housed on the LoC’s Flickr page.

Interesting project – and they are relying on ‘us’ to provide tags for the images!

So Flickr has launched a new tagging initiative called The Commons – “your opportunity to contribute to describing the world’s public photo collections.”

The photos, which are already available on the Library’s photo and prints page (along with over 1 million others), may not be on Flickr permanently. The length of the pilot program will be determined by the amount of interest and activity shown by Flickr users, according to the LoC.

Thank you Patrick. I have added a comment to the blog post, because you have alerted us to a fabulous resource. It is also particularly interesting that you are integrating metadata into the collection – I would say a leading initiative also. Wonderful!!

Hi,
We have a project similar to the LoC pilot project, called “PhotosNormandie”, which is alive since one year about:http://www.flickr.com/people/photosnormandie/
For now, descriptions are in French language and we are trying to improve them. So, we invite comments to get better localisations, better identifications, check and verify information, etc.
A main difference between the two projects is the following: we are using IPTC metadata that are embedded in our hi-res photos, but LoC does not use IPTC and their descriptions and tags are attached to Flickr platform.
With best regards
—
Patrick Peccatte